It’s always a delight when I stumble upon a pond or stream with dragonflies and damselflies flying around, defending their territories, basking, hunting, and propagating, their very existence a pleasure for me to witness. However, the rare joy is when I find a gem of a habitat – an area so ideal for odonate life that while I photograph one new species, I have to avoid being distracted by the other four or five more colorful new species I’m simultaneously seeing out of the corner of my eye. I had one such explosive pond-wading experience several days ago while visiting a spice estate near Kumily. 

I’d never seen three of these four species before this day, and hadn’t photographed the one I had seen before. While shooting these insects, I never had to walk (hop, crawl, or schlep) more than five feet in any direction to get a new species. They were unusually cooperative – a pleasant surprise, for once.

I currently don’t have my Odonata ID resources, although I’ll probably do posts on these individual species in the future (when I’ve ID’ed them).